Why are transgenders accepted whilst transracials are rejected?

There have been studies done on dead transgender people that demonstrate that trans people have different brain structures; a trans woman’s brain will have many (but not all) of the features that a cisgender woman’s brain has. The same goes for trans men.

There is no such evidence for transracial people as that’s not really a thing. Race is much more of an artificial concept than gender and has little biological basis. Black people are not of a different race than white people, they simply have different genetic traits that are well within the boundary for counting as the same species.

However, I would like to modify this question to let us say, if we find a person that is a 100% male and wants to become a female (not possessing a different brain structure). We would still accept that as we would for a transgender person who wants to have a sex change. so why would a person wanting to change their race get criticized, mocked and shamed? In this regard, both are relating to an artificial concept of what it means to be an individual, that doesn’t fit with what is considered as the “norm” based on physical appearance.

First, let’s dismiss our obsession with brain differences: Any thought or behavior is instantiated in the brain, and thus if you have a different thought or behavior from someone else then you have a different brain. So simply finding a brain difference between people that we know to be psychologically or behaviorally different is nothing special; it just says that our measurement abilities are strong enough to pick up on that particular brain difference.

For example: suppose (quite plausibly) that regularly wearing heels required more development in the balance-sections of the brain, then if you looked at the brains of regularly heels-wearing people after they died they would have systematically different brains from those that didn’t. Does that give us an argument for some sort of heels-essentialism? What about when a taxi driver has a more developed spatial reasoning or a violinist an expanded mapping of their hand in the brain? Are those arguments for some sort of taxi-driver-essentialism, or violinist essentialism?

What actually matters is not some sort of ‘biology’ or ‘genetics’ or other science nonsense, although those can be fun to know. What matters is that there is a marked regularity in behavior. A lot of people say they feel they are a different gender, and say it consistently and do drastic actions that show the sincerity of their belief. That is why we should respect their statements and identities, not because of some underlying biology. We should not hold biology above consistent self-report by many people.

This also helps explain why we accept the transgender identity but not Dolezal’s transrace identity. It becomes a matter of how many people attest to that identity and how much we trust those people’s self-reports. In the case of Dolezal, it becomes a single person, who seems to be doing it for gain, so we have reasons to discount her self-report as self-serving instead of genuine. However, if lots of people came forward with reports like Dolezal, endured great hardships in the name of those reports, and started to form a community. Then we would start to recognize it in a way similar to how we recognize transgender.